PART I

MAN, the RELIGIOUS ANIMAL

in which it is argued that, consciously or otherwise, everyone has a definition of sin, and that the proper question is not whether to use the word but, rather, which conception of sin is correct.

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CHAPTER II

GOOD AND EVIL: EVERYBODY’S PROBLEM

Woe to them that call good evil and evil good. - Isaiah 5:20

        Anyone who uses the word “sin” obviously assumes a distinction between good and evil. But this distinction has frequently been challenged by leaders of thought, both scientific and philosophic. A discussion of sin must therefore first deal with the question of whether, in the last analysis, the difference between good and evil is tenable or whether it is merely a subjective phenomenon which a man of intelligence can overcome. If it can be successfully suppressed, then all talk about sin becomes a dead issue. But if not, then sin at once becomes everybody’s problem.
        He who wishes to avoid this problem correctly concentrates his fire upon value judgments. His campaign acquires momentum from the fact that they have so often been harmfully applied in an area where they do not belong. They have been used, whether by infallible Church or by infallible Party, to dictate the results of inquiries which ought properly to be answered in terms of true or false, not good or bad. Rightly rejecting such “ideology,” some philosophers and scien tists have taken the further step by trying to eliminate value judg ments altogether, or at least to banish them to a subrational compartment of the personality, in the hope of reducing them eventually to the vanishing point.
        The present chapter, by illustrating the failure of these attempts, will suggest that they are in principle impossible. No one can censor the word “good” and “evil” without introducing some substitute for them, and no one can put them in quarantine without presupposing them. Even the legitimate suspension of value judgments for purposes of scientific investigation occurs within a total context of valuation. The scientist must first decide that it is “good” to seek objective truth. To make the further decision that it would be even “better” to dispense completely with the terms “good” and “evil” would repudiate the basis of the decision itself. It is therefore not surprising that everyone who attempts to banish these terms becomes the victim of a curious irony. The harder he tries to exclude them from life as a whole, the more they intrude into the subordinate

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areas where they are inappropriate. This is the first illustration of a principle which will recur throughout the book: No false premise can be consistently elaborated; this is the last laugh which the truth enjoys at the expense of all misconceptions of it. The following pages will apply this principle to some significant attempts to extinguish or compartmentalize value judgments.
        The standard argument against them is that they are merely relative, that they reflect only the private preferences of the individual. Words denoting value, such as “good” and “right,” are all reducible to terms of taste, either personal or social. From Protagoras to Bertrand Russell, the relativist’s favorite argument is based upon the lack of unanimity concerning the standard by which good and evil are judged. The conception of precisely what is good varies from culture to culture and even from man to man. Among certain Eskimos, for example, it is the duty of a son to kill his father when the latter has grown too old to fend for himself. And among many primitive peoples the first duty of a good host is to lend his wife to an overnight guest. The relativist defies his opponent to prove that any of these “local customs” is “better” than another. In the absence of proof he concludes that judgments of right and wrong merely reflect private preferences.
        This conclusion, however, does not follow. If people make different estimates of the temperature of a room, it by no means follows that none of their guesses is correct. If, in the days before Columbus, people disagreed as to the shape of the earth, it did not follow that none of their opinions was right. In short, lack of unanimity has nothing to do with the case.
        Failing to establish his point directly, the relativist attempts an indirect proof. He says, in effect, “Let us act on the assumption that value judgments are relative. Let us see what happens if we refuse to make them. If this experiment is successful, we may safely conclude that the distinction between good and evil is a thing of the past.” This proposal is entirely legitimate, but unfortunately it backfires. What it finally proves is that ethical questions possess a peculiar characteristic not shared by other problems. Where discussion about temperature or about the shape of the earth before 1492 could, by common agreement, be suspended, value judgments refuse to stay shelved. Rather, they are the precondition of every human enterprise. The relativist’s experiment is itself conducted upon the assumption

Good and Evil: Everybody’s Problem

that to suspend moral judgments would be “good” and to make them “bad.”
The following examples illustrate how every attempt to banish value judgments from intelligent life as a whole, as distinct from their deliberate suspension for special purposes, ends in self- contradiction. They all turn out to be devious ways of declaring that to distinguish good from evil is itself evil. This fact discloses something important about the nature of man. It means that man is that creature who is constitutionally obliged to make value judgments, including the judgment that they “should” be suspended in certain cases. The person who tries the hardest to eliminate them from his life as a whole turns out to be a crusader in disguise. He is sometimes the more bigoted for imagining himself to be neutral. The problem of good and evil must therefore be transposed from the question, whether to make the distinction, to the question, when to make it. And this forces the inquiry, “What is the true good?”

FUTILE ATTEMPTS TO AVOID VALUE JUDGMENTS

Of all the historic efforts to suppress value judgments, nobody insisted more strongly than Friedrich Nietzsche that moral norms are purely arbitrary. Nobody strove more manfully than he to demolish all rules of conduct on the ground that they might infringe upon the spontaneous impulse of the individual. Hence the title of his book, Beyond Good and Evil. The irony of his position, however, consists in his denunciation of value judgments, together with those who make them, as themselves wicked! The futility of his effort to get “beyond good and evil” is perfectly symbolized by the subtitle of his last book, “A Trans-valuation of All Values,” in which he declared that “fair is foul, and foul is fair.” That is, he simply labeled the accepted morality of his day “bad” and its opposite “good.” His grandiose ambition thus came to an end with the mere substitution of one set of values for another.
Another determined attempt to deny any objective distinction between good and evil was made by the nineteenth-century philosopher, Max Stirner. He thought he could avoid the kind of embarrassment which overtook Nietzsche by sticking to the formula, “My will be done.” The point at issue, of course, is not whether one can simply utter the sentence, “My will be done.” Obviously it is possible to

Hardness of Heart

make any statement whatever. Intelligent discussion begins only when both parties acknowledge a test by which their respective contentions may be judged legitimate. “The common man,” both Socrates and Protagoras agreed, “will say anything.” Rational discourse, however, tests whether a statement can be maintained consistently or whether it betrays its author into self-contradiction.
Stirner’s formula fails to pass the test. He could have made himself unassailable by simply saying, “I do what I want-period.” Although such a statement is irrefutable it is of doubtful significance. In order to communicate something of philosophic import he was obliged to maintain further that the maxim, “My will be done,” is right. And this is his undoing. If it is right, then those who follow it exemplify “good” conduct, while those who do not are “bad.” And this, of course, is precisely the implication which Stirner had set out to avoid. He too, by his resolute attempt to suppress value judgments, beautifully illustrates their inevitability.
At the present time the argument against the objective validity of value judgments is carried on by certain representatives of the sciences. Bertrand Russell puts it in a nutshell:

The chief ground for adopting this view [the relativity of value judgments] is the complete impossibility of finding any arguments to prove that this or that has intrinsic value. Since no way can even be imagined for deciding a difference as to values, the conclusion is forced upon us that the difference is one of tastes, not one as to any objective truths.¹

The contention is that all ethical norms are relative to a given culture. This position collapses the moment one recalls that within any given culture there is always at least a leaven of dissenting and prophetic spirits who criticize the foundations of its ethical standards. Chief among them are often the social scientists themselves. Ruth Benedict, for example, in her renowned book, Patterns of Culture, after stubbornly refusing, in the name of science, to make any value judgment on the foreign cultures which she studies, concludes with some trenchant and far-reaching judgments upon her own! Social scientists, in fact, continually suggest ways, often very constructive ones, in which society might be changed for the better. The theory that value judgments are all culturally derived is manifestly unable to account for the creative souls who would rather drink hemlock than compromise their standards. There is no more appropriate illustration than Bertrand Russell himself. In his book Religion and

¹Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 238.

Good and Evil: Everybody’s Problem

Science his repudiation of value judgments is sandwiched between confident moral indignation against wife-burning in India, stock-broking in America, the brutality of Hitler’s Germany, and censorship of the press and vindictive punishment everywhere. He reserves his strongest strictures for religionists and all others who commit the unpardonable sin of making value judgments. Russell has hardly finished baiting his trap before he falls into it himself.

The most piquant example of the same phenomenon occurs in George A. Lundberg’s book, Can Science Save Us? In sublime unawareness of the self-contradiction into which he falls the author makes the following declaration:

First of all, the advancement of the social sciences would probably deprive us in a large measure of the luxury of indignation in which we now indulge ourselves as regards social events. This country, for example, has recently enjoyed a great emotional vapor-bath directed at certain European movements and leaders. Such indignation ministers to deep-seated, bungle-fed sentiment of justice, virtue, and a general feeling of the fitness of things, as compared with what a scientific diagnosis of the situation evokes . . . . Social sciences worthy of the name will have to examine realistically all the pious shibboleths which are . . frequently the last refuge of scoundrels and bigots.²

Anyone who makes a value judgment is a scoundrel and a bigot! When uttered from the vaudeville stage, instead of from the pedestal of science, this kind of reasoning is readily identified as humorous. It belongs in the same category as the line about the man who said that anyone who went to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

In their determination to maintain a fixed neutrality some scientists replace the words “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” which would do full justice to their real problem, with various substitutes, such as “mature,” “adjusted,” “normal,” “fruitful,” and even, by an incongruous turn of the wheel, the word “scientific” itself. All these words are ambiguous. In common usage they are merely descriptive, referring to a situation of fact: “This apple tree is more fruitful than that”; “the car’s brakes are well-adjusted,” and so forth. But they can also be used in a prescriptive way, so as subtly to commend one way of behavior as preferable to another. Properly speaking, the word “mature,” for example, refers to a physiological state. It would apply equally to human beings of identical age and physical

²George A. Lundberg, Can Science Save Us? (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1947) pp. 43-5.

Hardness of Heart

development. But it can also convey a valuational sense. This occurs if the scientist gives his endorsement to the behavior of one of the two individuals by labeling it more “mature.” All such words can be used with an aura of “scientific objectivity” while actually concealing a judgment of value. The unwary reader can easily become the victim of an unintended propaganda whose effectiveness is all the greater for being clothed with the authoritative mantle of science.
Nor is the reader the only victim of this verbal ambiguity. The scientist himself often reacts with genuine horror at the suggestion that he has given anything but a descriptive account of the facts. The most notable current examples are the Kinsey reports. They purport to do no more than describe human behavior, and exhibit a condescending attitude toward those who have not yet outgrown the tendency to distinguish good from evil. In actual fact, however, they adopt an unmistakable advocacy of certain kinds of behavior as opposed to others. This is most transparent in the terms which Dr. Kinsey uses to describe individuals who have “high frequencies of sexual outlet.” He calls them “sexually more capable,” “excellent responders,” “uninhibited,” “high-rating individuals.” Speaking of promiscuous behavior, he says it is “biologically natural and basic.” Most flagrant of all is his suggestion that sexual promiscuity correlates closely with certain traits of character which he can be fairly sure will be regarded publicly as desirable, such as energy, alertness, vivacity, spontaneity, aggressiveness, and social poise. Having made this observation, the author then grants somewhat belatedly that it was based on insufficient data and actually holds true for only fifty-three per cent of his “high-frequency” individuals.³
Dr. Kinsey himself steadfastly refuses to see that these passages constitute an endorsement of sexual promiscuity. He takes refuge in the claim that his intentions were purely descriptive. The point at issue, however, is not all what his motives might have been but what the implications of the book are. His refusal to accept responsibility for them is a measure of the tenacity with which the scientist clings to the illusion that value judgments can be avoided. It also illustrates the potential danger to society of the man whose left hand does not know what his right is doing.

³Alfred C. Kinsey, Warden B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1948), pp. 325f., 542f., 574, 580.

Good and Evil: Everybody’s Problem

THE INESCAPABILITY OF VALUE JUDGMENTS

        The campaign against value judgments thus turns out to be itself based upon a value judgment. He who would dispense with them has already decided that they are “bad.” He differs from other moralists solely in not knowing that he is one. He who argues that all value judgments are simply the product of cultural conditioning is put to silence by the simple question: What if the culture decides to require the results of scientific experiment to conform to the expediency of a party line? Clearly there can be no science at all except on the basis of a prior agreement concerning how men ought to behave. Confronted by this challenge to his ideal of complete neutrality, the scientist occasionally does an abrupt volte-face and becomes a moralist with a vengeance. Is it reasonable, he asks, for the scientist, as the most reasonable of men, to submit to an irrational system of values? The question is only rhetorical. The culture exists to make the world safe for science and must accept from qualified experts the values suitable to this purpose. Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Measure of Man is an exquisite analysis of the spectacle of science, which has so often been the staunchest defender of the right of dissent, now making suspiciously authoritarian noises.
        Closer scrutiny of this phenomenon is reserved for a later chapter. The one remaining question for present purposes is: Are the foregoing illustrations simply cases in which the particular scientist or philosopher failed to practice what he preached? Might a more determined effort succeed where he failed? The argument has been that the decision to suspend value judgments, even for the legitimate purposes of abstract knowledge, itself rests upon a value judgment. The contradictions which overtake such attempts represent, not accidental oversights, but the nemesis which awaits all who tacitly presuppose what they explicitly deny.
        The conclusion is that to distinguish between good and evil is a built-in necessity for every man. To be sure, a number of difficult problems would be eliminated at a stroke if one could banish these words. Bertrand Russell’s reason for trying to do so is quite frankly to avoid the perplexing problem which otherwise arises, that of determining which is the good. The effort to reduce complex questions to simple terms is of course fundamental to scientific procedure. To substitute an easy but imaginary problem for a difficult but real one,

28 Hardness of Heart

however, does not resemble true science so much as wishful thinking.
The experiment of suppressing value judgments, though a failure, does disclose something about human nature which refuses to remain concealed. Man is that creature who must have some criterion of the good. No man can wish to jump out of this situation without presupposing it; that is, without first judging that it would be “good” to do so. This means that the true realist is the man who acknowledges the distinction between good and evil and with it the category of sin.